How did you motivate yourself to use BMax?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/How did you motivate yourself to use BMax?
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| I love B3D. I bought BMax when it came out - I've never used it - well, apart from running the demos. I can't be the only B3D lover that has bought BMax and prefers B3D. So, what exactly are you making in BMax that required you to use it? |
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| simple i plan on learning C++ and this will help me get OOP down early on also it kills BB in everyway |
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| Mmm, not a bad answer. How about the rest of you maggots? I'll be checking this thread again in about 8 or 10 hours - but it may be sooner. |
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| I prefer BB3D, and the only Max programming I have done was a pixel reading/writing test loop thing in both b3d and bmax to see which was faster.....max won. Havn't opened it since. I don't think its particually hard to learn. Its just A) I have no motivation to make anything 2D B) Even if i wanted too, my simple feeble mind can't get passed the documentation |
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| I agree puki, I love B3d (and Protean). However I never finish anything, and its more fun not finishing anything in BMax, cos whenever I give up on whatever it is Im not going to finish, I have loads of types, that are so so much easyer to use again than types in B3D. And so, I get closer and closer to finishing something. |
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| Simple, I think 2D looks better, and I want to release my game for Mac and Linux - so I pick MAX As for what I'm making - Its a 2D RPG Engine for the express purpose of making a series of games once I'm done, I have a dedicated team behind me and everything |
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| man how did you manage to do that, everyone i ask either have a team already or are too dang lazy to do anything that reminds me, i have to fire my music guy if he doesn't get to work soon |
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| simple, I showed them the vast ammount of Lore I've written, ran a few forum RPGs in the world, and after that they all admitted I was a genious and wanted in on the project Sorry, I'm an arrogant sod |
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| well i would love to hear our ideas, mine are all sci fi ones but sometimes i add in Oldworld sytle Lore and mystic stuff i saw one foruam that was making a small platformer and they where so disorganize, people just posting random boss and level code and not having any defined flow of gameplay, story, or anything the only guy i got is an idiot, he says he knows how to make music but he wants me to supply him with the tools to make stuff and his ideas for games are way too like Star Wars and not enough original |
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| I use it because it's a better language. |
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| I use it because it rocks, and I've had to wait since the Blitz Basic II days for a new version of Blitz to come out on a half-decent platform. ;-) |
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| I use it because - well, it's approaching C++ in speed and it's much faster to get something done. Also, the cross-platform feature is a huge plus. It's always nice to have as large an audience as possible. |
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| Personally I couldn't care less about 3D, and for 2D stuff BMax beats the others hands down. |
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| Bmax2d > B2D. Having said that I did start wondering whether Bmax2D > B3D +NSpritePro (now NSprite2) and/or SpriteCandy. I'm too lazy and don't have enough time to do anything about it. |
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| I can knock up a 2d game with Sprite Candy and B3D far quicker than using MAX. It seems tidier too. The docs for MAX really do let it down. |
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| But you can better structure and extend it with BM thanks to OO. (especially the extend part is far easier thanks to extend mechanism) |
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| I prefer max because of the OO. I could care less for 3d as i'm very bad at making meshes. I like reusing classes and i like to treat my gameworld as a bunch of intelligent objects. |
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| I started using it because the guy paying the bills wanted me to use it. But I've grown attached to things like putting functions in types. Also I've learned some new things, and improved my coding style because of it. I still do not subscribe to the OOP EVERYTHING philosophy, but some OOP things can help you origanize things better. I'm still working on refining this new style though. One issue that has come up is keeping track of where I am loading my graphics. If I have a loading screen for example, I have to load the loading screen graphics befroe everyhtign else so they're loaded in the loading type. But then there are things like the main game graphics which get loaded in the graphics type. Maybe they should be loaded in a main game type, but there is none. There is a fruit type though, and that loads the graphics for the fruit, but the fruit are just one item in the game. So I have some gameplay related things being loaded in their specific types and others being loaded in my general graphics type which isn't really geared towards that, and it's a mess. As I add more stuff to the game though, that stuff gets more refined and in the future hopefully, I'll know the right places to put the stuff in the first place to make the close as clean and maintainable as possiblee. And speaking of maintainable, superstrict has been a big help in making sure I declare all my variables. I'm very careful with my code as it is, and not declaring my variables wasn't generally a big issue for me, but other people who use my code would sometimes delcare a variable with the same name as a global I'd used and this would cause a problem. It didn't happen often to my knowledge, but now that's not really an issue. I'm still not entirely happy with some of the things Mark chose to do in the language but it is definitely an improvement over previous versions of Blitz. At least for the pros. It might be a bit too complicated for beginners now. I myself took a month to really get the hang of it. |
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| Bottom line is your programming language has to do what you want it to. You can't be fighting your language all the time, it sucks. Bmax doesn't fight back that often. Thats why I like it. Plus I can wait for 3d for now. I don't have a whole lot of use for 3d, but if I do, there's SOW (Simple OGRE wrapper) and Truevision3d to fiddle with in Bmax if I get the hankering. Oh and mini b3d too! |
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| some OOP things can help you origanize things better. Good boy. 'OOP everything' is for people who don't know that OOP is supposed to make life easier... |
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| I started by finding a couple of things that were a lot more effort to do in Blitz3D than Max that I wanted to do. 2D in 3D and multiple lists spring to mind. Next I recoded a couple of old B3D routines in Max and watched them fly. After that it just grew on me. |
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| I enjoyed Max with its cleaner coding structure and more OO means of design. But I got sick of having to recode things that worked perfectly fine in older versions of Blitz but are poor in Max, putting up with sporadic problems and extreme slowdowns on various machines and poor ide and lack of manual. 1 step forward and 3 steps back. So now I'm back to loving B3D and B+ again. Now that I'm preficient in B3D and NSprite, there's not a single reason to use Max again for the immediate future. USe B3D and NSprite and cut 500Mhz of processing power off your program. |
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| Simple really. The game I wanted to create couldn't be done in Blitz3d. At least not practically. That much code would have become messy and unmanageable in no time. Leaving OOP to one side, BlitzMax's modular nature means that I can code large sections of the game as modules, which is not possible with Blitz3d. ( Includes are not the same thing ;) ) And now I get OOP, a much, much more powerful 3d engine, and a bunch of third party modules to make the game even better. But that's a bonus. The main thing was to make a very large project manageable. |
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| I chose BlitzMax for several reasons. 1. 2D rotation/alpha 2. OO code 3. OpenGL 4. Cross-platform 5. Modular design - smaller EXEs 6. Future expansion (including Max3D) I want to make 3D games in future, but I'm only working on 2D stuff now just as an exercise to get my head around the language/OO. If I can make a few quid as well, that'll be a bonus. Couldn't go back to Blitz3D. |
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| Because I had BPlus, and was disappointed it didn't have OOP and also because some portals turned down my last game because it asn't "bling" enough and I realised I needed the 3D card effects in 2D that BMax offers. Then I made the Grey Alien BlitzMax Game Framework, and my new game uses that. |
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| I really like OOP and Strict. I thought I would never look back right when I got max. (All but one of my games are 2D anyways) |
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| Blitz3D doesn't work. That was about all the motivation I needed. No way in hell I'd switch back now, MAX is just such a huge leap forward. Besides which my Blitz3D CD has long since been archived, and there's no way I'm searching theough all those CDs to reinstall Blitz3D. |
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| Switched to Mac. Like OOP. Primarily into 2d so the scaling/rotation/alpha is a big bonus. |
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| Interesting and in some cases unexpected responses. I had given up programming since letting go of my Amiga setup about 5 years ago since I was immigrating to USA, so gradually got accustomed to using Macs here, but could see no way of getting into programming them because I don't like C, C++, Java or having to learn o/s coding interfaces. Then when Max was suddenly released on the Mac I instantly knew it was the right thing to get into - a language that I mostly already understood from BB2 on the Amiga, meaning that I could finally EASILY leverage the power and capabilities of the Mac platform in an understandable way. Plus the very tempting prospect of cross-platform development, plus the amazing speed boost over the old Amiga Blitz - being able to leverage OpenGL 3D acceleration to do stuff that I could never do before. It's great. If it wasn't for Max on the Mac I wouldn't be here now. I never used Blitz3D. Not all that into 3D at this point, personally. When Max3D comes along maybe that will change. |
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| Um....how come when I clicked to read this thread again I got prompted to login to Boiled Sweets' site with a user/pass? It didn't happen on any other thread. Am I on crack? |
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| no - happened here too. Anyway.. I like OOP + Just how easy it is to set everything up. I've tried using C++ but thats alwasy be way to much hassle to setup (I love to hate C++). And BLide just makes it so much better to use. |
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| Happened for me on more than one thread. |
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| Me too - must be your sig Boiled Sweets? |
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| Has happend for me as well, first time only Friday |
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| There are several people with such "funny" phishing virus scripts applied and most of those are seriously bad (they get blocked by my antivirus and are classified as the Ebay phishing virus floating around the net). I think BRL should take that serious and warn the people or temporaly ban them till they learned their lesson and get a virus scanner or leave inet alone. |
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| Ive been a Huge fan of C# since the early .NET beta's somewhere in 2000/2001. Finally seeing Blitz getting some OOP love was more than enough reason for me to switch from B3D. Add to that the fact it runs on linux, macOS and Windows And you get raw access to Opengl really made it a no-brainer for me. Blitzmax rocks. |
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